Up close and sensational: the best monologues made during lockdown

AN IMPOSSIBLE WOMAN The beady-eyed character of Iseult Golden's monologue could be an Alan Bennett creation:_ _steely and unsentimental, she speaks her mind smartingly in a video

message to her daughter who refuses to talk to her. Her tone is spiky at first but Marion O'Dwyer's wry, understated delivery gives the drama a quietly pained depth. Part of the

Abbey theatre's monumental series Dear Ireland,_ _it captures the bristling complexities of love between mothers and daughters in eight bittersweet minutes. JEMIMA Part of a podcast

series, The Lockdown Plays, this thrilling read-through reminds us that Inua Ellams is as much a poet as a playwright. Performed by Phoebe Fox, it contains the literary quality of a short

story and dramatic tension of a play. A woman speaks in intense, elliptical ways about her boyfriend but directs her words to another woman. Her tone remains taut and mysterious until the

final twist when this love triangle is explained. BANGERS This begins like a pop video with a song played over sexy closeups of a woman's skin, and segues into a steamy bedroom scene,

narrated and performed by Danusia Samal ("She grips the top of the bed, toned arms nicely displayed"). Her character's performance of lust stops in a piercing moment of

self-knowledge and Samal interrogates the internalised male gaze with clever subversive subtlety. As playful as it seems in form, Bangers (part of the Virtual Collaborators series) leaves a

disturbing aftertaste. BALCONY BONDING If there is a funny side to lockdown, it can be found in Rachel De-lahay's off-the-wall offering, filmed like an Instagram Live video and

featuring a millennial organising a socially-distant R&B singalong with her hitherto anonymous neighbours. Susan Wokoma performs embarrassed Englishness with comic aplomb and her nervous

wittering distils the pain of being young, urban, alone and in need of human contact. Chosen from submissions to feature in Papatango's Isolated But Open series, this is delightfully

silly stuff. NIGHT 4 If Thursday-night clapping reminds us of NHS heroism, Aoife Martyn divests her character – a hospital nurse at the rockface of the Covid-19 pandemic – of any vestige of

saintliness. Norma Sheahan's nurse is an overworked and irascible woman who would be unlikable were it not for Sheahan's sensational distillation of emotional exhaustion. This

10-minute film from the Dear Ireland series offers a slice of lockdown life that is chilling, humane and tragic at once. HIS FOR THE WINTER "I'm used to his hands around my neck

but it's different if you're not in bed." So says Marli Roode's character in this monologue about female desire and male violence. Among the winners in the Popelei Seed

Commission: Women in Lockdown, it captures the explosive mix of lust, love, jealousy and need in an abusive relationship. It has a stark but poetic quality with a strong performance by

Hannah Morley. EMBARRASSED Katie Arnstein's monologue appears to be a light, lunchtime rumination by a mother about a blanching moment, long ago, when her school careers adviser shamed

her in class for having ambition. But beneath the humour lies anger around his chauvinism and, it is hinted, class prejudice. Another gem from the Popelei Seed Commission, with Laura Bayston

capturing a wistful sense of derailed ambition but also a mother's determination that her daughter will never be diminished in the same way. FLESH Zoe commandeers her flatmate's

YouTube channel for a cheeky chat. "It's been 638 hours since I've had sex," she says, and then: "I love wanking … Is wanking sex?" She proceeds to flirt, lick

her fingers and divulge intimacies with joyous abandon. Part of Graeae's Crips Without Constraints series, it comes with subtitles and there is great, uninhibited writing from Anita

Kelly along with a beguiling performance from Francesca Mills. It is tender, too, beneath the eye-watering detail, about the yearning for human touch.